We’re playing an interesting little game at my research lab these days. Â It’s called “Try To Learn Microsoft Visual Basic Without Randy Catching On”.Â You see, Kevin will soon be leaving the research group for a new job in Utah, and once he departs, someone is going to have to take over the development and debugging of the Visual Basic portion of the Alice authoring tool.Â Although several of us need to know Visual Basic for various programming tasks, none of us want to be burdened with the awful headache of maintaining the colossal, disorganized mass of Visual Basic code that makes up the Alice front end. Â Although we all are reasonably proficient in Visual Basic, we all refuse to admit our knowledge, for fear that Randy (our director) will say, “Gosh, you seem to know a lot about VB.Â Why don’t you take over the Alice VB project?”

While pretending to look at photos of
women in lingerie, Dan learns about the
design of custom ActiveX Controls.

And so we are forced to learn Visual Basic in secret.Â So far I’ve managed to hide my VB knowledge quite effectively by wrapping my copy of Mastering Visual Basic 5 inside of a recent issue of Maxim magazine every time I read it.Â But sometimes there are close calls.Â For example, last Saturday I was experimenting with FlexGrid widgets when Randy walked into the lab.Â What could I do?Â Thinking quickly, I minimized Visual Studio and started playing Minesweeper.Â Phew!Â That was a close one.Good thing Randy never reads monzy.com.